


I Am Glad You Are Here with Me (Here, At the End of All Things)

by ambitiousbutrubbish



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Depression, M/M, in the loosest posible way, look just not very happy, not canon compliant after Erwin's death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 17:11:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13792314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambitiousbutrubbish/pseuds/ambitiousbutrubbish
Summary: Levi lives.





	I Am Glad You Are Here with Me (Here, At the End of All Things)

**Author's Note:**

> I haven’t really payed attention to AoT in years, but I heard what was happening and I couldn’t let that slide. Characterisation may be a little out of date, but please forgive me.
> 
> Normally I only put warnings at the end of fics, but it would be irresponsible of me to not say straight-up that this contains a somewhat oblique reference to suicide. Ok, you have been warned.

“You are alive.”

Hange takes up the Commander’s office and the bolo tie. Levi lets them go without a fuss. He knew Erwin before he ever had either one, and they always felt like something that he would give up, eventually; in the brief moments where Levi allowed himself to imagine that they would have a future. They were just _things_ , made to be passed on.

Levi refuses to move out of the bedroom, and Hange doesn’t ask. It isn’t a thing. It is _theirs_. Was theirs. Sometimes Levi doesn’t remember to think about it in the past, because it doesn’t feel _real_. It can’t be real.

He dreams of Erwin. That feels real. He dreams that Erwin rolls out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. His movements have not been as quiet since losing his arm, and it’s awkward enough to disentangle himself from Levi - to move the solid, safe weight of his arm from around Levi’s waist and push himself into a seated position - that Levi stirs too. When he doesn’t return after ten minutes, Levi starts to wonder what could be wrong, if Erwin is ill, and he gets up himself to go after him. Erwin is not in the bathroom, and Levi heads to the bedroom door, to see if he has left to go to his office and work now that he is awake. Erwin would sacrifice him and everyone he knows if it meant defeating the Titans; but even so, he is mindful of Levi’s sleep. 

He swings the door open and calls for Erwin. No one replies.

Levi wakes, and he is standing in the doorway, looking down the dark, empty corridor. In some strange way, the blackness seems to pulse and waver, like it is getting closer, hoping to consume him. He can feel something lurking just beyond his field of vision, watching, it’s eyes on him staring, and calling for him to come forward and embrace it. But he sees nothing but a row of closed doors. He doesn’t know if he called out like he had in his dream. Even if he had, he does this so often that no one would react anyway. And no one dares mention it the next day.

He doesn’t cry. Erwin would hate it, if he wasted his time crying for him. And crying is useless. Levi made his decision, and now he must live with it as best he can. 

He doesn’t go back to sleep.

********************

“You are alive.”

Erwin so rarely asked him to hurt people. He preferred to do his deals with charm and pretty words. He and Mike would go to parities in Mitras and schmooze with the rich and powerful that occasionally deigned to give them money. Levi was never quite sure what went on there, but he knew Erwin hated it. 

He would come back exhausted, hair just a little out of place, shoulders just a little slumped. They loved each other. Even if Erwin never told him so, Levi knew it was true. He saw it in his eyes, in his rare, soft smiles. Felt it in the way he touched him so _carefully_. Levi did his best to do the same. But Erwin still didn’t like to be seen vulnerable. 

Even so, Levi would let them indulge in gentleness. Just for a night. He kissed him softly, slowly, and helped him undress, pushed his shirt over his shoulders and down his arms. The shirt buttons alone likely cost more than everything Levi owned in the Underground. It was the kind of pointless displays of wealth that Levi would normally have liked to burn down, but the shirt was _Erwin’s_ , and nothing Erwin did was ever pointless. When he asked, Erwin told him that the best way to get donations was to look like you didn’t need any. 

After undressing, Erwin would sink into a bath. Sometimes Levi would join him, but it was a little cramped. More often he would perch himself on the rim - just like he had done so many times on Erwin’s desk - and help clean off the stink from the perfumes that the rich used to cover the stench of a city that was dying under the weight of people who had nowhere else to go. Levi didn’t know which smell was worse. 

Even asleep, Erwin was all hard muscle, and Levi’s soapy hands would slide across his back and chest easily. He would dig in to his neck and shoulders, work out the knots, and scrub the grime of the day away while Erwin sat there with his eyes closed, his head hanging loose. Levi took his time cleaning. Clean was good. Clean was _safe_ ; he had seen diseases in the Underground that should have been wiped out decades ago, but filth let them thrive. Clean was something he could control, while the world kept spinning on and down. By the time Erwin got out of the bath, the water was almost always cold. He never complained. He knew what it meant to Levi.

And then they would make their way to bed. Levi always slept alone in the Underground. When it got cold, Furlan and Isabel would curl up together for warmth, but Levi never joined them. When he and Erwin finally admitted to how they felt about each other and started to share a bed, it took a long time for Levi to learn how to be comfortable with it, and to not feel crowded. Eventually he learned to love it, the heat of another human body, Erwin’s comforting presence in the arm draped across him, a reminder that he was there are watching over him while he slept. But it was only on the nights after Erwin sold his principles for just enough money to keep the Survey Corps afloat that Levi let him hold him tight, wrapped himself around him as best he could and let him know that he was there too, in return.

It was a routine that he has missed desperately since even before Erwin died; since he lost his arm, and making his way into Mitras became more dangerous than simply running out of funds.

But sometimes, the Survey Corps had needed information that Erwin couldn’t get from charming old ladies, or by reminding old men of the glories of their youth that they had never lived themselves because they were cowards who had hidden with the Military Police. And Levi didn’t like hurting people, moved past that when he got out of the Underground. It was something he did when he was a thug with no future, not once he found a new path and purpose. But Erwin asked, and Levi followed orders. And they always told him everything.

Hange doesn’t have Erwin’s charm, but they never ask Levi to hurt anyone for information. They don’t have to. The pigs in Mitras all betrayed Erwin with their secrets and their inaction. He volunteers.

********************

“You are alive.”

Levi doesn’t care about humanity. He never has. He regrets the death of individuals, finds strength in his fury at their loss, but he owes humanity nothing; not when it tried for so many years to make him nothing. 

In the Underground, he had dreamed with Furlan and Isabel of leaving the city and the people and humanity behind, of escaping to the wide open world beyond the walls and living beholden to no one but themselves. They had been so naïve. They had seen the world beyond the walls, and it was not wild and free, and it had killed them. Only Levi is left. The trees outside grow taller, the forests denser, and all his friends decay to feed them. Humanity hardly matters, in the face of everything that will continue without it.

But Erwin cared about humanity, and Levi keeps fighting to realise his vision. It’s all that maters now. He promised him.

He let Erwin die because he’s selfish. Humanity needed Erwin, far more than it needed that brat Arlert. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t thrust Erwin back into living and fighting and hurting. He couldn’t keep giving the one thing he really cares about anymore to people who didn’t deserve him. Who hated him. Erwin gave them everything, his very heart and being. He made the sacrifices that no one else could, to give humanity back it’s place in the world. And they called him a monster for it.

Levi could not sacrifice the way that Erwin did. He chose himself over humanity. He chose to give Erwin peace.

Hange didn’t approve. They still don’t. Levi is not told to stay in his quarters when they are not on an expedition, but he knows to anyway. Hange is a little unhinged, but they are strong; resilient. Purposeful. They would not have hesitated to save Erwin, children’s pleading be damned. 

But Levi doesn’t really care about Hange’s opinion.

Erwin would not have approved, either. He sacrificed squadrons to push forwards past the walls; civilians to keep life behind the walls inhabitable. And he suffered, but he stayed the course. “Monster” never grated on his nerves like it did for Levi. Erwin did everything with a clear head and his eyes wide and looking ahead. 

But Erwin is dead now, so his opinion doesn’t really matter. 

All that matters is Levi’s promise. 

********************

“You are alive.”

Mikasa is the one who ends it. She surpassed him years ago, when he lost his purpose and her’s lived on. He has never been able to understand why she chose Eren, but humanity is lucky that she did. 

It’s Mikasa who drives her blades into the nape of the last Titan, even as it runs blindly towards them, oblivious to its status or its fate; cuts in so deep that its head flops forward with its neck opened like a hinge. Mikasa: his distant cousin, but she’s more like family than anyone else who shared his name. He hardly remembers his mother, and Kenny kept him alive and likely even cared for him in his own way, but broke him down into the desperate thug that Erwin later moulded into a person with a purpose. 

Mikasa understands him, even the parts that Erwin never could. She understands what it’s like to be devoted to one person, what it’s like to be stronger, to be _more_ just by being near them. He had tried to explain it to Erwin once, and Erwin has smiled that soft smile that he hides from everyone else and told him that Levi made him fight harder as well, to get back home to him. Then he had bent down to kiss him on the forehead and headed out to the practice yards to watch the new recruits. And it was humbling, to know that Erwin thought of him when he was in danger, that the thought of Levi was a source of strength to him, but Levi could tell that he didn’t _understand_. Not really. It wasn’t the same: when he was around Erwin, he didn’t feel stronger. He _was_ stronger. Mikasa knows what that is like, and she never questioned him when he was Humanity’s Strongest no longer. For a time, she was the only person he would talk to. By then, there wasn’t much he could teach her, but still they trained together for hours after everyone else had retired. 

Levi kills Zeke, just like he promised. In the end, it’s anticlimactic. Zeke’s enormous head topples from his shoulders and Levi stands with blades worn down to the hilt from hacking through skin and muscle. The battle rages, completely uncaring of Levi or the body everything has changed.

He should have died then. It would have been right. 

But the world has never cared about what was right.

It took Erwin from him.

********************

“You are alive.”

They beat the Titans, and the kids come for him. 

Even when Erwin was alive, the bedroom they shared was rarely visited. Since his death, no one has dared seek Levi out in what has become his own, lonely space. But flushed with the bravery of victory, Eren, Sasha and Jean come for him. 

They tell him that Armin and Hange have a plan to venture out beyond the walls and map the world they find out there. In not long at all, they hope, the rest of humanity will see the bright future outside their cities and live a new life free from confinement, and free from the fear of death just over the horizon. They want to see the ocean.

They believe it will happen. Levi can see it in their faces. In some strange way, they _shine_. Even after everything they’ve sacrificed and lost and broken down, they believe that the world can be better, that there can be _hope_. It’s everything Erwin would have wanted.

Levi tells them to take Mikasa with them instead. 

They leave him alone in his room. Jean pats him on the shoulder as they walk out, and Levi would hit him for the indignity, but he doesn’t have the heart for it.

They leave him alone with nothing but his blades for company. He spots them out of the corner of his eye, at first. Just there, sheathed and propped up against the wall. They seem almost to be calling out to him, and he looks properly. Zeke’s barely human blood has dried on the grip, but Levi can still feel the sticky warmth of it flowing over his hands. He wonders if Erwin ever felt the phantom sensation of his own blood flowing from where his arm had been. 

Erwin had cut off his own arm so he could continue to fight for humanity. At first, Levi had stayed with the Survey Corps because he wanted to know the kind of man who would do that - what made Erwin Erwin. But even as close as they were, he never figured it out. He never got the time. It’s why he let him die, in the end.

Levi wonders why they left him with his blades. Maybe they thought he was finally passed his mourning period, and it was safe. Or maybe they don’t think he has a place in this new world.

And they’re right.

Besides, it wouldn’t be right to go to the sea without Erwin.

********************

“You are alive.”

They tell him after Erwin’s death: you are alive, and you need to eat and sleep and rest from scrubbing the bathtub so hard that your fingers bleed.

“You are alive.”

They tell him when he jerks back into consciousness, the screams of falling titans and dying men echoing in his ears. And later, when his eyes flutter open after falling while training with Mikasa

“You are alive.”

They tell him when they finally beat the Titans. They have won, and he is still somehow, inexplicably there to see victory. 

“You are alive.”

The ghost tells him, late at night in the bedroom they once shared, laying down next to him. Levi never believed in the supernatural, or anything that wasn’t in front of him, but Erwin’s phantom haunts him. It leaves no physical indent on the bed, but he can still feel it beside him, like a black hole sucking in all light and warmth. He feels like he could just roll over and fall into it forever. It’s cold, but if it could freeze him, he would welcome it. 

“You are alive.”

And this is the secret that Levi tells only to the ghost: “No, I am not.”

********************

Mikasa is the first to touch the ocean. Everyone else stops at the shore, just out of reach of the tide pushing out, and she steps forward, walks until the water laps gently at her waist. She holds the urn just above the water level, cradled in both hands, and she pauses, not entirely sure where to go from here. 

The Commander had mixed the ashes themself, but they had given them to her to spread. She hadn’t known Commander Smith very well, though she had respected him. Though he may not have started the Survey Corps, he had built them. But she and Levi had had an understanding bound by blood, so in a way she supposes that it is right that she will send him off into the wind and the water. 

She takes the lid off the urn with a steady hand, shuffles around a little so her back is facing into the breeze, and tips it upside down. The ashes seem to pour out strangely slowly, some blowing out to sea, some scattering on the surface of the ocean and mixing into the water. 

Mikasa watches in silence. She doesn’t even hear the sound of her friends wading in after her until she feels Eren grab her hand. She squeezes in acknowledgement, and Armin takes her other one, and as they watch the ashes swirl away thinks that without Levi, she would have lost this. She hopes that, wherever he is, he can feel her thanks. 

And somewhere, _elsewhere_ , Levi and Erwin are together again, and they do feel it. And they finally see the ocean.


End file.
